Eliza's Daughter -A Review

Eliza's Daughter by Joan Aiken was one of the books I picked out at my little library last weekend (2/6). I finished it Saturday morning & I meant to get a review up before now, but it is always hard to get anything done on the weekends. (I am either busy running errands, reading, shopping, sewing, or being lazy and enjoying some zone-out time watching a movie or two!) I did pretty much all of that this weekend, along with some playing in the snow!!

I was not overly impressed with this book. I must clarify that I think Joan Aiken is a great writer in the terms that, I was never bored while reading this book. She did a great job keeping my attention and developing characters, I just didn't really like the characters in the book. (I guess the original problem stems from the fact that I really didn't like what she did with the beloved characters from the Austen classic Sense and Sensibility!) I was liking her heroin, Eliza, who is a new character, and some of the other new characters as well. Of course there were things I didn't like about the new characters or settings of the book, which is normal, but overall I was still enjoying it. (I was pretending like these were all new characters, none of them were the ones from Sense and Sensibility, they just happened to have that same name and similar background stories, but were not the same ones!!) But then the end of the book came and I decided I just disliked this book all together!

I am sure that there are plenty of people who would enjoy this book completely, but it just wasn't for me. From the beginning I didn't like certain things about it, but I thought if I just ignored the fact that it was supposed to be about the characters from Sense and Sensibility I could like the book, but then the end just ruined it all for me! I am somewhat picky about book endings, if I am going to invest so much time into something, I want to like how it ends. (I am picky about movie endings, but less so than books, because a movie only takes a few hours of your time at most, books can take days, weeks or, sometimes with me-I am a slow reader people, even months!!)

Overall, I am not saying don't read this book, it wasn't like I felt like it was horrible or anything, I just personally didn't like it. I am now wondering if I want to invest my time into any of her other books. Joan Aiken wrote one called Jane Fairfax, based on a character from Jane Austen's Emma, and another one, Mansfield Park Revisited, that takes place after Austen's Mansfield Park ends. Both of these were on my to read list, but now I am not so sure. Has anyone already read these?